Think Fast with Daniel Kahneman

[0] This is Hidden Brain.

[1] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[2] Economic theory rests on a simple notion about human beings.

[3] People are rational.

[4] They seek out the best information.

[5] They measure costs and benefits and maximize pleasure and profit.

[6] This idea of the rational economic actor has been around for centuries.

[7] But about 50 years ago, two obscure psychologists shattered these foundational assumptions.

[8] The psychologist showed that people routinely walk away from good money.

[9] And they explained why, once people get in a hole, they often keep digging.

[10] The methods of these psychologists were as unusual as their insights.

[11] Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent hours together talking.

[12] They came up with playful thought experiments.

[13] They laughed a lot.

[14] We found our own mistakes very funny.

[15] What was fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid.

[16] This is Daniel Kahneman.

[17] The insights he developed with Amos Tversky, who passed away in 1996, transformed the way we understand the mind.

[18] That transformation had philosophical implications.

[19] The stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable.

[20] And that's an illusion.

[21] And they create the illusion that you can predict the future, and that's an illusion.

[22] Professor Kahneman, your important insights from...

[23] Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

[24] The new bridges between economics and psychology are attributed to your pioneering research.

[25] We've drawn extensively on research inspired by these two psychologists.

[26] So for Hidden Brain's 100th episode, I interviewed Nobel Prize winnings, psychologist, Daniel Kahneman.

[27] We taped this interview before a live audience at NPR headquarters in Washington, D .C. Danny, welcome to Hidden Brains 100th episode.

[28] Thank you.

[29] So, Danny, as I was reading that introduction, I could almost see you cringing because you've spent a lifetime worried about overstatement and exaggeration and overconfidence and luck.

[30] And I'm wondering if we could just start there.

[31] If you were to look back at your own life, How much of your success would you attribute to talent and how much to luck?

[32] I mean, you know, some talent was really needed, but luck, you know, I can see so many points in my life where luck made all the difference.

[33] And mainly the luck is with the people you meet and the friendships you make.

[34] There is a large element of luck in that.

[35] And my life was transformed by sheer luck in, you know, find.

[36] finding a partner, an intellectual partner with whom we got along very well and we got a lot done.

[37] Before we get to Amos, I want to talk about another person whom you met.

[38] This was in 1941, 42.

[39] You're a very young Jewish boy living in German occupied Paris.

[40] And one day you're out beyond curfew.

[41] An SS officer spots you and runs up to you.

[42] What happens next?

[43] Well, he doesn't run up to me, but he beckons me to me to him.

[44] And I was wearing a sweater.

[45] It was past the curfew and my sweater had a yellow star on it and so I was wearing it inside out.

[46] And he called me and he picked me up.

[47] And I was really quite worried that he might see my yellow star.

[48] And he hugged me tight and then he put me down, he opened his wallet and he showed me and showed me a little boy.

[49] And then he gave me some money, and we went on separate ways.

[50] Obviously I reminded him of his son, and he wanted to hug his son, so he hugged me. That's an experience.

[51] For some reason, I mentioned it in my Nobel autobiography, but as illustrating a theme that was a theme in my family, actually, my mother especially, that people are very complicated.

[52] And that seemed to be an instance of something very complicated.

[53] And so it stayed that, you know, in that sense, it's a memory that was important to be.

[54] So when an event like that happens, I can imagine most people just saying thank God and moving on.

[55] But you found it interesting, partly because you said there's something interesting that happened here.

[56] And from a very young age, it seems, you were drawn to these curiosities about how the mind worked.

[57] In some ways, the SS officer was making a mistake.

[58] He was looking at you and drawing an association from you to sort of to another child, maybe his own son.

[59] And of course, in many ways, it was an error.

[60] It was, the mind was not working in a quote -unquote rational fashion, but it was more associative.

[61] The complexity was that it's the combination of somebody who must have done some very evil things and have thoughts and very evil thoughts.

[62] And yet he was hugging me. And, I mean, you know, that kind of complexity was everywhere.

[63] I mean, Hitler, you know, like children and like flowers and was very kind to some people.

[64] So we have a lot of difficulty putting that together with the things he did.

[65] But that complexity was always interesting.

[66] At what point do you feel you became the person who was paying attention to his own thoughts?

[67] Because so many of your early insights were developed, obviously, experiments that you ran on people, but you were also observing the way your own mind worked and observing, if you will, oddities in the way that your own mind worked.

[68] Was that always the case with Danny Kahneman?

[69] I think so.

[70] I mean, I wrote a psychological essay when I was 11.

[71] So I, you know, it was short.

[72] But, well, you know, I'll tell you what the essay said, actually, because it shows Quite a few things, I think.

[73] But so my older sister was taking exams and philosophy, and I had read some Pascal, and you know, Pascal explained why gave proofs of God's existence.

[74] Pascal said that faith is God made sensible to the mind.

[75] And I, you know, a little boy of 11, very pompous, of course, I said, how right.

[76] And then the psychological part was, I said, but this is very hard.

[77] The experience of faith is very rare.

[78] And so that's why we have churches and organs and pomp to sort of, and I called it Erzatz.

[79] I mean, a sort of fake experience to generate a fake experience.

[80] So that was, you know, that was psychology.

[81] And obviously, you know, that's what interested me then.

[82] and it's interested me since.

[83] Later on, as you were working as a professional psychologist now, you made in some ways a career of thinking about how your own mind worked.

[84] And I'm fascinated by this idea, because in some ways, a lot of people look at how their minds work and they're defensive about it, or they defend how their minds work, or they say, no, what I did would most make perfect sense.

[85] And instead, in some ways, I think your humility, and clearly it's a temperamental quality of yours, helped you to sort of see some of these oddities and think about why they happen.

[86] That's not quite the way it happened, actually.

[87] I had my friend and collaborator, Amos, and I, we worked together on that, and nobody ever accused him of being humble.

[88] He was not.

[89] But what the two of us did.

[90] We found our own mistakes very funny.

[91] And so we had a lot of fun.

[92] just exploring what is our first impulse when it's wrong.

[93] And that can be an endless source of fun.

[94] There was no particular humility.

[95] On the contrary, in a way.

[96] That is, we never thought that people are stupid because we were finding all of that in ourselves and we didn't think we were stupid.

[97] So there was very little humility there.

[98] What there was was irony, and the irony was part of the fun.

[99] What was funny about it?

[100] I can see why it was interesting or why it was curious, but I understand that when you and Amos worked together, there was just endless amounts of hilarity.

[101] There was a lot of laughter.

[102] And what was fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid and sort of holding back because you know better.

[103] But it's that impulse to say things that are without basis or that are purely associative And really, it doesn't matter, you know, how intelligent you are or how educated you are.

[104] There are those intuitions or those thoughts that come from somewhere that come very reliably and predictably and that are wrong.

[105] So that, you know, it's a big field to study.

[106] Meeting Amos was clearly a stroke of luck.

[107] I mean, I don't think your life would have taken the same path that it did.

[108] Certainly not.

[109] I mean, you know, it's rare, really.

[110] But he was exceptionally smart and very, very quick.

[111] And there is, when you have two people who are working together who really, in a way, love each other's mind and admire each other's mind, that is very special because it gives you a sort of confidence when you say something and the other person sees something in it that you haven't seen.

[112] And this is very rare that this kind of mutual trust and looking for what's interesting and good in what the other person is saying.

[113] And both he and I sort of made, we were both quite critical people.

[114] I mean, he even more than I, but we made an exception for each other.

[115] And that was a joy.

[116] Psychologist Daniel Kahneman lay in the groundwork for what is today known as behavioral economics.

[117] In 2002, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

[118] So many of your early insights were based on thought experiments, where you came up with sort of very simple questions that you posed to both yourselves and to other people.

[119] Why are these thought experiments?

[120] And when we talked a few days ago, you actually said that this is part of the reason you think that your work appealed to a larger audience, because even if the ideas were complex, the questions were inherently interesting and accessible.

[121] Well, that's a stroke of luck, really.

[122] There is a famous psychologist, Walter Michel, who wrote a book on the marshmallows test a few years ago.

[123] And in 1964, he published his dissertation.

[124] And his dissertation was done in Jamaica with small children, and he asked those children, two questions.

[125] And one of them was, there is a fairy who can make a view whatever you want to be, what you want to be.

[126] And the other question was, you can have this lollipop today or two lollipops tomorrow.

[127] What do you prefer?

[128] Now, these two questions were correlated with everything inside.

[129] I mean, they were correlated with how bright the child was, with how educated the parents were.

[130] And I just fell in love with that idea of the psychology of single questions.

[131] And I looked for ways to do that sort of thing.

[132] And the work with Amos on judgment turned out to lend itself to just that.

[133] That is, there is a single question that elicits a funny thought, and it makes a point.

[134] And you know, in the first place, we were very lucky in the choice of problem.

[135] There are just no other problems in psychology that lend themselves to that sort of thing, that you can involve the reader and present questions to the reader, and you make the reader think.

[136] So you can do that in vision, and everybody here, I'm sure, has had introductory psychology at some point, and there are those demonstrations of perceptual effects like figure ground or perceptual organization.

[137] And they are on the page, and that's the phenomenon.

[138] You are your own subject.

[139] Now, you can do that on vision.

[140] You can do that on judgment, which is the field that we did in.

[141] And that's it.

[142] You know, you can't do it on self -control.

[143] You can't do it on many other things.

[144] You can't do in personality studies.

[145] So when I was talking of luck, that's luck to hit on something that we happen to be prepared for and that is uniquely, you know, lends itself uniquely to something.

[146] something that creates experiences in readers, you know, sheer luck.

[147] So after many, many years of collaboration together, your partnership with Amos founded, I think it's fair to say.

[148] I'm wondering whether you've given the same thought to why that happened that you gave to other things that your mind does.

[149] And whether those insights, I mean, so many of your insights about how your mind has worked have helped the rest of us, is there anything here that could help the rest of us?

[150] us think about collaboration and partnership?

[151] No. I mean, you know, there's natural stresses in collaboration.

[152] The world is not kind to collaborations.

[153] You know, when you have two people who are reasonably talented and they work together and they overlap closely, then I'm quoting Amos, he said, when I give a lecture, people don't think I need anybody else to do the work.

[154] And that was true to some extent of me as well.

[155] And so that creates stresses.

[156] Of course, I've given a lot of thought to it.

[157] We were fortunate that we went on as long as we did.

[158] We were fortunate that we remained friends, even when there were stresses in the collaboration.

[159] I remember research that Abraham Tesser did many years ago where he looked at couples or other pairs of people who were very similar to one another.

[160] And one of the things he found is, of course, the closer and similarity people were, the more they reached for the same goal.

[161] You had, let's say, a couple who were both writers, the success of one person tended to make the other person feel smaller.

[162] Even though you're happy for your partner, there's a part of you that says, why can't I have the success that my partner has?

[163] And it's a very human thing, of course.

[164] Yeah, of course.

[165] And it's, of course, especially true if it's joint work in which there happens.

[166] So this is, you know, there's really a dynamic.

[167] And it's, I would say, we were just about perfect for, you know, 10, 12 years, which is a very long time.

[168] When we come back, what Danny and Amos discovered together.

[169] Stay with us.

[170] This is NPR.

[171] This is Hidden Brain.

[172] I'm Shankar Vedantam.

[173] For the 100th episode of our podcast, I interested.

[174] He interviewed Daniel Kahneman.

[175] He's the author of the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[176] In the 1960s, Danny spent a summer with a group of eminent psychoanalysts at a treatment center in Massachusetts.

[177] The center had a routine.

[178] A patient was examined for a month by multiple experts, and then everyone came together to do a case study.

[179] They reviewed notes.

[180] They interviewed the patient together.

[181] One particular case left a strong impression on Danny.

[182] the morning, we learned that the young woman about whom we'd written the report had taken her life.

[183] And they did a very brave thing.

[184] They ran the case study.

[185] And I was deeply impressed, both by the honesty of what they did.

[186] But what they were trying to do, they were seeing signs that they had missed.

[187] And it was, you know, in retrospect, obviously this was hindsight.

[188] at work.

[189] I mean, now you know what's happened, so you're seeing signs and premonitions.

[190] And people are really feeling guilty.

[191] I saw her on the stairs and she looked strange.

[192] And you know, why didn't I stop to inquire?

[193] I mean, you know, people look strange all the time.

[194] But, you know, when somebody, so, yeah, that was an important episode.

[195] And of course, what this episode reveals is how once an event happens, we trace back a story about how that event came to be.

[196] And of course, in journalism, we do this all the time.

[197] I remember after the 9 -11 attacks, we spent years sort of deconstructing all the errors that were made and drawing a pattern.

[198] And when you see that pattern laid out, you have to say, well, those people must have been really dumb because it's so obvious that there was a pattern that led to the 9 -11 attacks.

[199] Yeah, this is hindsight, and it's one of the most important phenomena, actually, in the psychology of judgment, because you understand the part, And the past surprises stop being surprising at the moment they happen, you know, then you have a story and you shouldn't have been surprised.

[200] And when you reconstruct it, you also reconstruct wrongly what you believed at the time.

[201] So you minimize, you reduce a surprise.

[202] So not only was it inevitable, but also I almost, I really sensed it, so, you know.

[203] Now, where this goes really wrong is that the stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable.

[204] And that's an illusion.

[205] And that they create the illusion that you can predict the future, and that's an illusion.

[206] And it's maintained by hindsight, so hindsight is a central phenomenon really.

[207] And of course the errors we make eventually led to prospect theory.

[208] which was the work which you were cited for in the Nobel Prize, among other things, if you were to explain prospect theory to an eighth grader, is there a way to do that?

[209] Well, it's very easy to explain.

[210] It's much harder to make it interesting.

[211] It's the theory that dominated thinking when we wrote, and to a very large extent, still dominates economic thinking, it was formulated first in 1738, so it's been around a long time.

[212] And what it says is that when you're looking at a gamble, what you're evaluating is you're evaluating two states of wealth.

[213] Your wealth if you will win, and your wealth if you will lose, and then if you're offered a sure thing, instead of your wealth if you get that true thing.

[214] And for two hundred and, you know, six years and so, people accepted that theory.

[215] Now the theory really is, doesn't make sense if you stop to think about it.

[216] People don't think of gains and losses as states of wealth.

[217] They just don't.

[218] They think of gains and losses as gains and losses.

[219] That was the fundamental insight of prospect theory.

[220] So, you know, you could ask you that, you know, you get a Nobel Prize for that.

[221] about.

[222] And you do in a certain context, because if it surprises people.

[223] One of the things you say in the book is our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation, our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

[224] And of course, you've spent a lifetime exploring the depths of your ignorance and all of our ignorance.

[225] But in many ways, there's something deeply human about this.

[226] To see the world as being chaotic and unpredictable and noisy is fundamentally unsettling.

[227] And it's easier to see the world as understandable and comprehensible and that fits in a story.

[228] We really have no option.

[229] I mean, the mind is created to make sense of things.

[230] I mean, vision makes sense of things.

[231] We see objects.

[232] We see objects moving.

[233] And it's the same with judgment and thinking.

[234] We have to make sense of things And we can't do otherwise So it's not that we would be unsettled If we did otherwise, we can't We make sense of things That's the fundamental We're sense -making organisms And of course it's worth pointing out That even though this leads to errors It's also the case that much of the time This is enormously valuable And our sense -making ability It actually works great That it actually allows us to navigate the world successfully Of course, I mean, you know We're right almost all the time I mean, you know, we couldn't survive if we weren't right almost all the time.

[235] We make interesting mistakes and sometimes very important mistakes, but mostly we're very well adapted to our environment.

[236] So when you think about news events, you know, if I tell you there are 19 hijackers who have flown planes into major buildings and then we go back and we get biographical sketches of these people and we understand their ideologies.

[237] and, you know, it activates things in our minds because, of course, there are these agents that are doing these things to us, and, you know, we then spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to combat terrorism, and you say, okay, that makes sense.

[238] This is a major threat we've dealt with it.

[239] But let's say you have another threat over here, where I tell you that in 80 years or 100 years, the temperature might rise five degrees, and as a result of this, the oceans might warm a little bit, and sea levels might rise by two or three inches.

[240] And as a result of this, the models predict that climate events will become more serious, at least according to the models, but you have to understand probability.

[241] And in order to try and head that off, you actually have to take very painful steps right now, maybe driving your car less, maybe living in a smaller house, all kinds of things that are painful in the here and now, for something that seems difficult, often the distance, and requires you to really understand statistics and probability.

[242] You've actually called climate change in some ways sort of a perfect storm of the ways in which our minds are not equipped to deal with certain kinds of threats.

[243] Yeah, I mean, it's really, if you were to design a problem that the mind is not equipped to deal with, you know, climate change would fit the bill.

[244] It's distance, it's abstract, it's contested.

[245] And it doesn't make, it doesn't take much.

[246] If it's contested, it's 50 -50, you know, for many people, immediately.

[247] You don't ask, what do most scientists do, which side of the National Academy of Sciences?

[248] That's not the way it works.

[249] Some people say this, other people say that, and if I don't want to believe in it, I don't have to believe in it.

[250] So it's, I'm really, well, I'm pessimistic in general, but I'm pessimistic in particular about the ability of democracies to deal with a threat like that effectively.

[251] If there were a comet hurtling down toward us, you know, an event that would be predictable whether they, we'd mobilize.

[252] So it's not even that it's distant in time.

[253] If it was going to affect our children, we'd mobilize.

[254] But this is too abstract, possible contestant.

[255] It's very different.

[256] We're not doing it, in fact.

[257] So besides being pessimistic, does your research and understanding of this phenomenon give view any insight into how we should maybe talk about climate change and what we can do?

[258] Well, I think scientists in a way are deluded in that they have the idea that there is one way of knowing things and it's you know things when you have evidence for them.

[259] But that's simply not the case.

[260] I mean, you know, people who have religious beliefs or strong political beliefs, they know things without having, you know, compelling evidence for them.

[261] And so there is a possibility, you know, of knowing things which is clearly determined socially.

[262] I mean, we have our religion and our politics and so on, because we love or used to love and trust the people who held those beliefs.

[263] There is no other way to explain, you know, why people hold to one religion and think other religions are funny, you know, which is really a very common observation.

[264] So the only way would be to create social pressure.

[265] So for me, it would be a milestone if you manage to take influential evangelists, preachers, to adopt the idea of global warming and to preach it.

[266] that would change things.

[267] It's not going to happen by presenting more evidence.

[268] That, I think, is clear.

[269] When we come back, we'll talk about happiness, memory, and noise.

[270] Stay with us.

[271] This is NPR.

[272] This is Hidden Brain.

[273] I'm Shankar Vedantham.

[274] Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for a series of ideas that helped develop the field of behavioral economics.

[275] Danny, I don't know how you got an ethics panel.

[276] to approve the study, but it's one of my favorite studies of all time.

[277] Tell me about the colonoscopy study and the peak end world.

[278] Well, the colonoscopy study was devised to test an idea that when people form a memory of an episode or an impression of an episode that had a certain duration, that actually they completely neglect the duration.

[279] And what they're sensitive to are illustrative or crucial moments.

[280] And in particular, when it's a painful experience, it's the peak of the pain and it's the end of the pain.

[281] It's how much that pain you're at in the end.

[282] So that was a theory for which we had other evidence.

[283] And my friend Donald Vredomier, who is a physician in Toronto, he volunteered to create a study around that.

[284] So a study was run on people at the colonoscopy, which at the time was very painful.

[285] I mean, for those of you who, you know, have not reached the age of colonoscopy, it won't be painful when you have it.

[286] But at that time, at that time, it really was.

[287] So people had a colonoscopy.

[288] And then half of them, you know, it ended when it ended.

[289] But for half of them, they left the tube in for another minute or so.

[290] Now, this is not pleasant.

[291] Nobody would volunteer to have the tube in for another minute.

[292] But it improves the memory very significantly because it's less painful than what went on before.

[293] It's not desirable.

[294] You wouldn't choose it, but it makes a difference between a really aversive memory, which you have when they pull the tube at a moment of high pain.

[295] The whole thing is very bad.

[296] But if you end on a gentler note, even if it's still painful, the memory improves.

[297] Memory wasn't designed to measure ongoing happiness or to measure total suffering.

[298] For survival, you really don't need to put a lot of weight on duration, on the duration of experiences.

[299] It's how bad they are and whether they end with.

[300] I mean, that is really the information that you need for an organism.

[301] And so there are very good evolutionary reasons for the peak and end rule and for the neglect of duration.

[302] It leads to, you know, in some cases, to absurd results.

[303] So if you were a policymaker, I feel like this is a real ethical dilemma.

[304] So let's say, for example, I'm running a hospital.

[305] I think the colonoscopy study or versions of it have later found that if you actually give people the painful experience followed by the less painful experience, more they are more likely to come back for the next colonoscopy because their memory of the colonoscopy was less painful.

[306] So you could argue from a public policy standpoint where you want people to get tested, the right thing to do is to extend their pain in order that they will remember the pain as being less and come back more often.

[307] However, also from an ethical point of view, you could argue that subjecting people to more pain than you need to subject them to is unethical.

[308] So what should we do?

[309] That's what is easy.

[310] I mean, you know, there are, harder versions of it.

[311] But that one is easy because you would never frame it that way.

[312] You would just tell the people who are doing the procedure.

[313] Be very gentle at the end.

[314] You know, be slow and gentle at the end.

[315] And, you know, that sounds like a good thing.

[316] And it's good for policy and it will get more people.

[317] It will leave better memories.

[318] It will more compliance and so on.

[319] So there are ways sometimes of not presenting quite as sharply as you did.

[320] What would be a more difficult, ethical dilemma that I didn't think of that you could have placed, apply to yourself?

[321] Well, I think that if real suffering is involved, you know, somebody in pain, and say, you can be in pain and barely conscious, or you can be in pain and they will eliminate the memory at the end.

[322] So how much weight should you give to pain that the patient might be screaming but will not remember?

[323] You know, that's an ethical dilemma.

[324] And of course, this does have all kinds of other implications.

[325] You've done some work looking at, you know, if you could go on a vacation but you couldn't take photographs on the vacation.

[326] How would you think about the vacation?

[327] In other words, you essentially have these two models of how the mind works.

[328] that there's a mind that experiences life and there's a mind that remembers life and these two minds don't always agree with one another.

[329] Well, I mean, they have different interests in a way.

[330] So I spoke of the experiencing self, which is the one that lives moment to moment.

[331] And the remembering self is the one that keeps score.

[332] And the scores that are generated are generated by rules, such as the peak end rule and so on.

[333] And so sometimes you can see that experiences a very different duration and how do they matter.

[334] Oh, what is the value that you should attach to an experience that you will not remember or that somebody will not remember?

[335] So my question in that context was, I mean, consider your plans for your next occasion.

[336] And now imagine that at the end of the vacation, They will destroy all your pictures, and they'll give you an amnesic drug so that you won't remember a thing.

[337] Now, would you change your vacation plans if you knew that?

[338] And many people would, actually, because I think many people go on vacations to create memories for future consumption, which doesn't always happen.

[339] I mean, in my case, never happens.

[340] So they're never looking pictures.

[341] But that's a dilemma.

[342] So you conducted a study, I remember a few years ago.

[343] I think it was published in the journal Science, where you evaluated how happy parents felt as they went through their days.

[344] And there's two ways you can, of course, ask the question.

[345] You can ask parents, how happy are you with parenting?

[346] And many parents will say it's the best thing they ever did.

[347] But then you can also ask parents on a moment -to -moment basis as they're parenting how they feel.

[348] And the answer turns out somewhat differently.

[349] Well, yeah.

[350] I mean, it turns out that parenting, if you really take the experiencing view of it, then, you know, it's like washing dishes, you know, maybe a little worse often.

[351] And then, you know, and then it has its moments.

[352] And it's the peak moments that people remember.

[353] And when people remember the peak moments, it makes the whole thing worthwhile.

[354] So it changes the meaning of the whole experience.

[355] So, that was a much contested finding, very unpopular finding, but a very strong finding.

[356] You know, if you look at the experiences, people have more fun with their friends than with their spouses, you know, quite a bit.

[357] And if you were trying to make, to increase the happiness of the experiencing self, you would do very different things than people do, because what people typically do, if they try to satisfy their remembering self.

[358] And maximizing the happiness of your experiencing self would make you more social, less ambitious.

[359] It would make you spend a lot more time with people that you love or like or enjoy, because it's very largely social.

[360] So there are important implications of that distinction.

[361] Is there any insight that someone can draw from this work about whether they should become a parent, given this discrepancy between the remembering self and the experiencing self, and I should remind you before you answer that your daughter is in the audience here with us.

[362] I have never met, almost never met, people who regretted having had their children.

[363] So if you measure a thing by the remembering self, and that's really the only way, the point is that the experiencing self doesn't make decisions.

[364] All the decisions are made by the remembering self, and the remembering self never regrets having happened.

[365] children.

[366] So, you know, from that point of view, the answer is clear.

[367] Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Lane the Groundwork, for what is today known as behavioral economics.

[368] Danny explained many of these insights in his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[369] You're working on a new book with a couple of other people, but it's also a new area that you're looking at.

[370] A lot of the earlier work looked at the issue of biases and errors, and there's a new focus for a lot of the work that you're doing right now, and it has to do with a question of noise.

[371] What does that mean?

[372] Well, there are really two kinds of broad families of error.

[373] There is bias, and there is noise, and noise simply means randomness, it's variability that shouldn't be there.

[374] So you know, if you imagine target shooting, then where the cluster of shots is, that could be far from the target, that's bias.

[375] But the variability of the cluster, that's noise.

[376] Many people, and certainly I in the past, are very interested in biases.

[377] And we think in terms of biases much more than we did like 60 years ago, where people would think of random error.

[378] And I now think that we have exaggerated biases and that most errors are really noise.

[379] They're randomness.

[380] They are, and it's a very different approach to error than focusing on biases.

[381] I mean, I don't want to overstate it.

[382] Biases are very important and so on.

[383] But noise has been neglected, and I think it deserves attention.

[384] Do you think it has implications that are different from the implications related to bias when it comes to public policy, for example?

[385] Is it easier to reduce the effects of noise to address them than bias?

[386] Well, certainly.

[387] I mean, you can, in the first place, if you take judgment away and have a computer makes the decision, the computer will be noise -free.

[388] Algorithms are noise -free in the sense that you present the same problem twice, you'll get the same answer.

[389] Whereas if you present the same problem to different judges or to the same judge at different times of day, you are going to get different answers.

[390] So you can eliminate noise by algorithm.

[391] And I think we should do that wherever we can.

[392] And where we can't do that, we should, I think the implication is, that we should try to structure the judgment process so as to make it more reliable.

[393] I'll give you an example where this really matters.

[394] There is a thing in the United States that people call the asylum lottery because people who ask for asylum get a judge, They get the judge at random.

[395] And in some cases, they have an 80 % chance of getting through and in other cases, 15.

[396] That's noise.

[397] And you really don't want it, I think.

[398] We're in the process right now at Hidden Brain of hiring someone.

[399] And in fact, we just conducted two interviews today and we have a couple tomorrow.

[400] And as I was doing the interviews, I was thinking about some of the work that you've done.

[401] In some ways, this was your earliest work going back many, many decades, looking at how you can reduce errors in the interview process.

[402] And I don't know whether you think of it as bias or think about it as noise, but either way, it leads to flawed outcomes, and you came up with a technique that could address it.

[403] Yeah, I actually did come up with the technique a little more than 62 years ago, actually.

[404] I was an officer in the Israeli army.

[405] It was in 1954, the Israeli army was very young, it was 1956, actually.

[406] And I set up an interview system, which is a template for a lot of what is going on, and is certainly a template for the way I think decisions should be made.

[407] I haven't thought of that for many years.

[408] And the template is you have a problem.

[409] You need to evaluate people.

[410] Break it up into dimensions.

[411] You know, it sounds elementary, and I'm not going to say anything very surprising.

[412] Make judgments of each dimension independently of all the others.

[413] That's independence is essential.

[414] Don't form a general impression until you have all the information.

[415] Delay intuition.

[416] Don't give it up necessarily.

[417] Delay it.

[418] And the results are just better when you do things that way.

[419] And I think that's probably is very general as a way of thinking about judgment and decision making.

[420] It's a way of reducing noise of increasing reliability and it's not very costly and I'd like to promote it.

[421] So of course the idea, if I understand correctly, is you score people on different criteria, give them a ranking so that you're evaluating it.

[422] But there's also an interesting piece of advice, which I understand they still offer in the Israeli army when they're doing these evaluations, a final piece of advice after you've done the calculations.

[423] What is that advice?

[424] Yeah, well, that's...

[425] So I set up that interviewing system.

[426] I was 22 years old.

[427] And the interviewers who were 19 years old, they really didn't like that suggestion.

[428] What they really wanted was to have a heart -to -heart conversation and then to form a general impression of how good combat soldier that individual would be.

[429] But they said, you are turning us into robots.

[430] And they had a point.

[431] And then I told them, okay, you know, I'll compromise it.

[432] You do it my way, the interview.

[433] You run the whole interview just and you generate those scores independently, fact -based and so on.

[434] Don't think of anything until the end.

[435] And in the end, close your eyes and give a score.

[436] How good a soldier will that person be?

[437] Now, much to my surprise, that intuitive score is really very good.

[438] I mean, it's as good as the average of the six straight, and it's different, so it adds content.

[439] So having an intuition, if you delay it, it's quite good.

[440] The kicker of that story was that about 50 years later or so, I got a Nobel Prize.

[441] So for a short time, I was a celebrity in Israel.

[442] And they took me to the army, to my old base, and they explained how they were doing the interview because they were still using that system, essentially, but very little change.

[443] And then the commander was telling me, and then she said, and then we tell them, close your eyes.

[444] So that thing had lasted for 50 years, that expression.

[445] So what I love about that, it's not so much intuition versus bias, but it's more maybe by just delaying intuition, the intuition gets better.

[446] And of course, if you don't do the detail analysis, you still have an intuition that feels very powerful and your ignorance is sort of papered over by this tendency of the mind.

[447] You know, intuition is compelling as such.

[448] I mean, you know, we have the intuition almost by definition.

[449] We trust it.

[450] And so delaying this and remaining very close to facts as you collect your separate dimensions is really very useful and it permits an intuition that is well informed because normally we form intuitions very quickly and then we spend the rest of the time confirming that Miam, this intuition was right that by the way is a fact it's been studied that way in interviews people form impressions in the first minute or two and they spend the rest of the time testing that they are right and of course confirming that they are right So this was clearly an example of how you came up with a mechanism in some ways to overcome how the mind works.

[451] But on many, many other fronts, it seems like the biases errors that you've discovered, even yourself, you say that you don't necessarily, you're not the master of those biases after studying them for more than half a century.

[452] Yeah.

[453] I mean, even myself.

[454] I mean, I'm considered, I'm considered one of the worst offenders on.

[455] many of these mistakes.

[456] So, you know, I'm overconfident when I really preach against that, and I make extreme predictions, and I preach against that.

[457] But, you know, some people read thinking fast and slow in the hope that reading it will improve their minds.

[458] I wrote it, and it didn't improve my mind.

[459] It's not those things that, you know, they're deep and they're powerful and they helped to change.

[460] Danny, yesterday was your 84th birthday.

[461] Happy birthday.

[462] You've studied a great number of different things over the years, and you tell me that one of the things that you're actually interested in studying is the subject of misery, much more than happiness, you're fascinated by misery.

[463] Now, of course, I can just put this down to the pessimism that clearly you've demonstrated for a long time, but you actually say you can draw more specific conclusions and there are takeaways from studying misery than from studying happiness.

[464] Yeah, I'm actually, you know, I contributed to what is called happiness research, but I'm really disturbed by it.

[465] And I'm disturbed by positive psychology.

[466] And in part because I think that making people happier is, you know, could be important, how to do.

[467] It may not be society's business to make people happier.

[468] But reducing suffering, that's, something else.

[469] It's easy to agree that this is important.

[470] It's easy to agree that society should be involved.

[471] Furthermore, it's easier to measure misery than to measure happiness.

[472] And what we can do about it is clearer than what we can do to enhance happiness.

[473] So from all these points of view, I think that, and again, you know, it's a matter of semantic luck.

[474] You know, we speak of length and not of shortness.

[475] And so we speak of happiness and not a and not at the other side of unhappiness.

[476] But if you focus on unhappiness and misery, you end up doing very different things, thinking very different thoughts, and taking different actions, which I think we should do.

[477] So you've been a wonderful sport, Danny, and I'm really grateful for you for coming down, and I'm almost a little shamefaced about doing what I'm about to do right now, which is I'm wondering if we can increase your happiness just a tad, but it might increase your misery by singing happy birthday to you.

[478] You're one of Hidden Brain's heroes, and we feel that it's really appropriate to end with that.

[479] So on the count of three, Happy birthday to you.

[480] Happy birthday to you.

[481] Happy birthday, dear Dan.

[482] Happy birthday to you.

[483] Thank you.

[484] Danny Kahneman, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain's 100th episode.

[485] This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Raina Cohen and Kara McGurk Allison and edited by Tara Boyle.

[486] Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Renee Klar, Parth Shah, and Matthew Schwartz.

[487] Our engineers are Andy Huther and Neil Tavalt.

[488] I'm Shankar Vedantham.

[489] See you next week.